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The effect of traditional media consumption and internet use on environmental attitudes in Europe

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Abstract

Information represents an essential input in social processes influencing human sentiment, attitudes, and behavior. With the rise of internet, information consumption habits have changed. The standard process of consuming news via traditional mass media (such as newspapers, radio and television) is now substituted, or complemented by news consumption via online sources. We study the effects of this behavioral change on environmental attitudes in Europe. More precisely, we ask whether this change has contributed to increased polarisation in environmental attitudes. We utilize a large-scale survey data across multiple European countries in the period from 2002 to 2010. We find evidence that traditional media (television, radio and newspapers) consumption, as well as internet use is associated with pro-environmental attitudes. Importantly, we also show that political preferences of an individual moderate the manner in which internet use is related to environmental attitudes. Among progressive and green voters, greater internet use is positively correlated with environmental attitudes. Among conservative voters, internet use appears to be negatively related to environmental attitudes. The pattern is similar, but much weaker, for TV consumption which constitutes a similar high-choice environment (compared to radio and newspapers). These results support the notion that internet use tends to strengthen people’s pre-existing beliefs (measured by voting behavior), much beyond the effect of TV viewership.

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Data Availability

All data used in the research is publicly available at www.europeansocialsurvey.org and https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu.

Notes

  1. As a result of government efforts, by October 2018, when the movement started, the yearly increase in the diesel price was 23%, while the corresponding price change for petrol had reached 15% (De Perthuis and Faure, 2018).

  2. Boxell et al. (2020) also find that the most likely driver behind political polarisation are changes unique to specific countries, rather than those that are universal across the globe (the rise of digital media being one of them).

  3. This is despite the fact, that within a given newspaper, advertising efforts from certain industries (e.g., car manufacturing) have shifted the tone of climate change coverage towards scepticism (Beattie 2020).

  4. This is not likely to be the case if cable television is not available. i.e., developing countries or years in the early 90 s.

  5. Countries participating in the European Social Survey are: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the UK.

  6. The only complication is the last category, which collects everybody who uses more than three hours of each corresponding medium. However, if anything, by including this category we are only under-estimating the effects of media on our key dependent variable.

  7. Such a conversion is convenient in order to produce measures that would be comparable across traditional and digital media usage variables. We have experimented with slightly different conversion amounts (for example values of 2 or 4 for ‘several times a week’ response, instead of 3). All results reported in this paper remain stable: no changes in coefficient signs or significance levels, only slight alterations in actual estimates. We have also created a dummy variable which takes value of 1 for all categories involving some internet use. Robustness checks of our results using this variable are reported in Table 7 in the appendix.

  8. For certain countries and years, we have information on multiple election rounds. In these cases, we only use information on voting behaviour from the first round of elections.

  9. The Manifesto Project (Krause et al. 2019) provides the scientific community with parties’ policy positions derived from a content analysis of parties’ electoral manifestos. It covers over 1000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents. The project provides a public Manifesto Project Dataset containing the parties’ policy preferences generated by the project.

  10. There are cases where we are not able to unequivocally classify a vote (i.e., the party in favour of which the vote was cast) into one of the four categories. These we classify as ambiguous and effectively drop from the relevant analysis.

  11. The results are not sensitive to inclusion of covariates. However, the setup with covariates is preferred in order to obtain precise estimates.

  12. These are models 1 through 4. Estimating Models 5 and 6 is not appropriate as the comparison across digital and traditional media coefficients will not be possible.

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Funding

The research was funded by Agence Nationale de la Recherche, grant number ANR-15-IDEX-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SKEMA Business School, Université Côte d’Azur (GREDEG), Valbonne, France

    Zakaria Babutsidze

  2. OFCE, Sciences Po Paris, Paris, France

    Zakaria Babutsidze

  3. Bard College Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg

  4. Griffith Business School, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia

    Andreas Chai

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  1. Zakaria Babutsidze
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  2. Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg
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  3. Andreas Chai
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Correspondence to Zakaria Babutsidze.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 Regression estimation results
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Table 6 Results for a robustness check exercise – Ordinary Least Squares estimation
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Table 7
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Babutsidze, Z., Blankenberg, AK. & Chai, A. The effect of traditional media consumption and internet use on environmental attitudes in Europe. J Evol Econ 33, 309–340 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-023-00810-0

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